Johnny Appleseed Birth Date September 26, 1774 Death Date c. March 18, 1845 Place of Birth Leominster, Massachusetts Place of Death Fort Wayne, Indiana AKA … He was quick-talking and restlessly energetic as a visitor, but wind-beaten, hollow-cheeked, and gaunt-looking from eating so little and walking so far. We do know he corresponded with a distinguished co-religionist in Philadelphia, William Schlatter, who was also his supplier of evangelical tracts, though unfortunately none of Chapman’s letters have survived. A Treasury of American Folklore , Johnny Appleseed, along with Abe Lincoln and George Washington, occupies a tiny section entitled “Patron Saints.” (John Henry and Paul Bunyan are “Miracle Men.”) But, legendary walker that he was, he is fabled as much for abusing his feet as for sporting tin pots on his head or cardboard headgear. When somebody jumped one of his land claims, his main concern seemed to be whether they would still let him take care of his apple trees. The Life of Johnny Appleseed. Scarcely a year after the birth of John, his second child, the father left to fight in the Revolution as one of the original Minutemen, first at Bunker Hill in 1775, then with General Washington’s army in New York the next year, wintering at Valley Forge in 1777-78. In any case, the experience may have estranged the two. From the TinCaps baseball team to the epic Johnny Appleseed Festival every September, the man who planted apple trees and walked through much of Ohio and Indiana has left a legacy here that many like to recall.. More important, he respected and sympathized with them at a time when many white woodsmen shot them on sight like vermin, to clear the woods, or else humiliated them by catching their horses and tying sticks in their mouths and clapboards to their tails and letting the horses run home with the clapboards on fire. In the gaudy parade of liars, killers, pranksters, boasters and boosters that fill up B. On his head, he wore a metal container for a hat. JOHNNY APPLESEED. Once a rattlesnake attempted to bite him while he slept. Mike Fink, a very rough guy who died twenty years earlier than Johnny on a trip to the Rockies, once set his common-law wife on fire in a pyre of leaves when she winked at another man. We think of the swaggering, unscrupulous prototype frontiersman who bushwhacked Indians and scouted for the Long Knives, the mountainman who went into the bush with two horses and a squaw, and in order to live, ate his pack horse in January, his saddle horse in February, and his sad squaw in March. The sack had holes for his head and arms. Browse more videos. He lived very simply. In good weather he slept outside; otherwise he would lie down on the floor close to the door of the cabin, as he “did not expect to sleep in a bed in the next world.” But one can picture the suppers of applesauce, apple pie, apple Strudel, apple dumplings, apple turnover, apple cider, apple butter, and apple brown betty he was served by farm wives who had settled in the vicinity of his nurseries. His mother died when he was very young, and his father moved to Longmeadow, Mass., and remarried. It’s thought that John Chapman, around 1792, at the age of eighteen, set out with his half-brother Nathaniel, who was seven years younger, for this frontier. Today we tell about a man known as Johnny Appleseed. Little is known about his childhood. He speculated in a couple of town lots in Mount Vernon, one of which he sold after nineteen years for a profit of five dollars. In about eighteen thirty, John Chapman got some land in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Longmeadow was on the Connecticut Path, walked by settlers going west toward the upper Susquehanna River, two hundred miles away. What would a conventional movie-maker do with a vegetarian frontiersman who did not believe in horseback riding and wore no furs; who planted fruit trees in praise of a Protestant God, and gave much of his money away to impoverished families he met; who would “punish” one foot that had stepped on an angleworm by walking with it bare over stony ground and regretted for years killing a rattlesnake that had bitten him in the grass; who would douse his campfire when mosquitoes fell into it? Johnny Appleseed has sometimes been called the American Saint Francis of Assisi. Report. He died in the home of a friend, William Worth. He said people in the future would remember his life and work. He was a colorful pioneer of the Indiana … He liked to plant on quarter-sections set aside for the support of the first schools, or might do so on an existing farm if the owner agreed to share what grew. With this canoe trip, apparently, his fame began. I gave her a clipping from the tree which she was going to try to grow. This was a time of wrestling great oaks and stupendous pines, of big snowstorms, when reportedly he toughed out one winter holed up on an island on French Creek subsisting on butternuts alone. One of his daughters, named Persis, and nineteen years younger than “Johnny Appleseed,” later was to play an important and softening role in Johnny’s life; but there is little evidence that John and Nathaniel ever troubled to see much of each other again, until 1842. He was shy in a crowd but a regular sermonizer among people he felt at home with—probably a bit of a bore at times, but no simpleton. Ascending the Muskingum, past Zanesville, to a tributary called Walhonding, or White Woman’s Creek, where the Licking River comes in, he poled up to the Mohican River and finally to the Black Fork of the Mohican, where he already may have had a nursery growing, because central Ohio by now was not unfamiliar country to him. The Legend of Johnny Appleseed If you have visited Apple Holler Farm Park recently, you will have seen and perhaps taken part in the Johnny Appleseed History Walk. Swedenborg himself had said, “All things in the world exist from a Divine Origin— clothed with such forms in nature as enable them to exist there and perform their use and thus correspond to higher things.” So the Swedenborgian spirit-world of souls and angels coexistent with a natural world, in which the true order of Creation had been diverted by man’s misapplication of his free will from the love of God to his own ego, quite corresponded, as far as it went, with the Indians’ view. The next season—his brother gone by now—he had moved fifty miles, to French Creek, another tributary of the Allegheny. They paused in the Wilkes-Barre region for a year or two, then may have ventured south to the Potomac in eastern Virginia and dawdled along from there toward Port Cumberland, then, via Braddock’s Road, to the Monongahela, and on by 1797 to Pittsburgh, during what was now John Adams’ presidency. However, some of the stories told about Johnny Appleseed over the years may not have been really true. He did not leave them just anywhere. Johnny Appleseed's Apples Weren't for Eating. Furthermore, a hundred years before John Chapman ever arrived, the French had brought apple seeds to the Great Lakes and Mississippi, so that some of the Indian towns along the old trails already had orchards, from which the settlers could trade or pilfer as the Indians gradually were driven away. His favorite was the two-foot-high, bad-smelling mayweed, or “dogfennel,” another alien, which spoiled the taste of milk when cows ate it and for a while was called “Johnnyweed,” with the idea that he might have been planting it everywhere as a practical joke. http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/archive/2007-05/2007-05-19-voa1.cfm?renderforprint=1, http://www.voanews.com/mediaassets/specialenglish/2007_05/Audio/mp3/se-pia-johnny-appleseed-20-may-07.mp3. Another time, he was trapped in the wilderness during a severe snowstorm. In his earthly life,” Ophia D. Smith noted in a centennial tribute by Swedenborgians in 1945, “Johnny Appleseed was a one-man circulating library, a oneman humane society, a one-man [medical] clinic, a one-man missionary band, and a one-man emigrant-aid society.” But because of the distance that separates us, and as a result of the void in scholarship until Robert Price’s biography in 1954—the fact that for many years historians simply ignored him as a character fit only for children’s stories—we can’t make a good estimate of the quality of his mind. Houston praised Chapman's work as a labor of love. But we don’t know how consistently he refused to eat animal flesh, or how constantly cheerful he was, or whether his habits of self-punishment—which might smack of the perverse to our modern temperament—discomposed his neighbors, who were an infinitely hardier lot and more inclined to defer to the example of the self-mortifying earlier Christian martyrs. The older Chapman, though a captain in time of war, had been an indifferent provider, and died in 1807. He did not, but undoubtedly he gave seeds to pioneers who ventured much farther west. Historians, by neglecting individuals of such munificent spirit as Johnny, and leaving us with only the braggarts and killers, underestimate the breadth of frontier experience, and leave us the poorer. In the tree, he discovered a mother bear and her cubs. As the trees grew, he returned to repair the fence and care for the land. Please support this 70-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage. In a way, his name is as durable as Andrew Jackson’s, who died in the same year, but he has been remarkably neglected by the historians, probably because he conforms to none of the national stereotypes and illustrates nobody’s theories. Along came 10 ha… He planted on the Sandusky; had fifteen thousand trees at Milan on the Huron; started a nursery in Defiance in northwest Ohio when that village was six years old, and other nurseries along the proposed route of the Miami and Erie Canal. There, he planted apple seedlings that grew and produced crops. He ate nuts and wild plums in the woods on his trips, and cooked his corn mush, roasted his potatoes, and probably carried Indian-style “journey bread,” which was made by boiling green corn till it was half done, drying it again in the sun, then browning it in hot ashes when ready to eat, pounding it fine, and possibly stirring in birch or maple syrup or summer berries or honey (though Johnny always left enough of that in the comb for the bees to live on). He did not interfere with the animals, and left before they knew he was there. 3:50. He had been a local character, but there were other applemen who made a business of selling trees, mostly as a sideline to farming. Free subscription >>, Please consider a donation to help us keep this American treasure alive. Playing next. In a short time, the seeds grew to become trees that produced fruit. Through these oak, hickory, and beech forests hogs ranged, as well as cattle, and there were great flocks of passenger pigeons, and wolves, which the more brutal pioneers skinned alive and turned loose to scare the rest of the pack. Born John Chapman (1774-1845) in Leominster, Massachusetts, he proved to be a man with a mission along the frontier, which in those days included western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. We know that he stayed out of fights in the rowdiest communities, even when provoked, according to his adage of living by the law of love although fearing no man. Apples offered something different in daily meals. In 1792, Ohio Company of Associates granted homesteaders 100 acres of land if they ventured further into Ohio’s wilderness. “I feel like most people hear cider and start thinking of plaid and hayrides and leaves and New England,” Pete McCoubrey… Mansfield lay between the Clear and Black forks, and Mount Vernon was on the Kokosing, which wasn’t far off. Johnny Appleseed was a small man with lots of energy. A. Botkin’s. After Johnny Appleseed died there were stories published about him, and festivals held in his honor all over the United States. He slept in the open air and did not wear shoes on his feet. Join us again next week for another PEOPLE IN AMERICA program on the Voice of America. His father, Nathaniel, was a farmer, carpenter, and wheelwright descended from Edward Chapman, who had arrived in Boston from Shropshire in 1639. He used his money to improve his apple business and help other people. Johnny Appleseed… After the article in, His life had extended from the battle of Bunker Hill to the inauguration of James K. Polk as president; and the last person who claimed to have seen Johnny Appleseed with his own eyes didn’t die until just before World War II. As most Chapmans know, Johnny Appleseed was a nickname for one of the many John Chapmans. That he walked Alone.… If many people never paid him for the seedlings he distributed so diligently, others returned his kindness by their hospitality to him as he passed back and forth. His father, Nathaniel Chapman was a Minuteman who fought in the Revolutionary War and served with General George Washington. In 1871, W.D. While he was there. When low on seeds, he returned east to Pennsylvania to get more. According to one story, they traveled up the Allegheny that fall to Olean, New York, in search of an uncle who was supposed to have built a cabin there, only to discover that he had pushed on west. As a religious enthusiast, he was more on the Franciscan model than the harsh zealots, from Puritan to Mormon, whom American social historians are accustomed to writing about. The location of his grave has also been a source of controversy for many years. His fifties seem to have been severely austere, like his twenties and thirties. Johnny Appleseed was born John Chapman in Leominster, Mass., on Sept. 26, 1774. I'm Faith Lapidus. The fence helped to keep the young trees safe from animals. Only three families lived in what has become Licking County, but Ohio was only two years short of statehood by then. From Toledo he traveled west up the Maumee River toward Indiana, working the banks of its tributaries—the Blanchard, the Auglaize, the St. Mary’s—the population of Ohio, meanwhile, having vaulted from 45,000 in 1800 to 580,000 in 1820. He preferred, if possible, nothing at all. Appleseed was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, and at the time of his death, Appleseed was 70 years old. He often sold his apple seeds to settlers. Odd as he was—with the gossip that trailed him hinting that earlier in life he may have been kicked in the head by a horse—he seems almost to have passed for a solid citizen here. Saint Francis established a Roman Catholic group that cares for the poor and the sick. His father, Nathaniel, was a carpenter and a farmer who earned modest wages with which to support his wife, Elizabeth, and his children. His birthplace now has a street called Johnny Appleseed Lane. It was produced by Lawan Davis. He was born—John Chapman—in poor circumstances in Leominster, in a cabin overlooking the Nashua River. Like the plainsmen and mountainmen, he was a man still “with the bark on,” but apples were his particular witness to God, and apples do not grow well on the Great Plains. Indeed, with the affectionate overfamiliarity of an expert who has perhaps overmastered a subject, he slightly belittles the legends he does believe. He moved along coincident with or a step ahead of the first flying parties of settlers, to have apple trees of transplantable age ready for them when they got their land cleared. A. Botkin’s. Resurrection was the simple continuation of the spiritual being without its corporeal or “natural” adjuncts, and the indifference to physical discomfort which he cultivated can no doubt be partly ascribed to his impatience to see that process speeded says Robert Price, his principal biographer. Some people said he loved to watch the flowers on apple trees grow and change into tasty fruit. In icy weather, at best he wore castoffs given to him—sometimes one shoe and one broken boot, tied on with varicolored string wound around his ankle, sometimes only one shoe, with which he broke trail through the snow for his bare foot. Chapman planted with thoughts about future markets for his crops. More than three hundred thousand apple seeds will fit in a single bushel, so he had his work cut out for him. In 1830, just after the future city of Fort Wayne had been platted, he is said to have landed on the waterside from the Maumee in a hollow log filled with seeds. Near Persis’ home in Fort Wayne, he had a log cabin and eleven cleared acres and timber cut for a barn, when he died in 1845. In Steubenville, Cincinnati, and Urbana, Ohio, he knew the leading New Church Swedenborgians, and between his arrival in central and northern Ohio and the time of his death, Swedenborgian societies sprang up in at least twelve of the counties there, many individuals testifying that it was Chapman, the colporteur of Christian literature, who had first “planted the seed.”. Despite his small roach of a beard, unkemptly clipped, and his dark horny feet and deliberately apostolic costume, he kept himself clean, and “in his most desolate rags” was “never repulsive,” his acquaintances reported. “… he ran with the rabbit and slept with the stream.”. He spent 46 years planting apple trees, covering an estimated 100,000 square miles with apple seeds across the “western” territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. The reason for John Chapman's life's work is unknown. Did no hurt with three words (okay, one word, but I’m tired of talking about the the Patriots): fall, apple-picking, and cider. Was God’s own man. See Johnny Appleseed Today in History - September 26 at The Library of Congress posted September 26, 2017 on Facebook. There is the story of Johnny quietly confronting a pharisaical camp-meeting preacher who had demanded of the congregation, “Where now is the man like the primitive Christian who is traveling to Heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” Johnny of course walked forward in the upside-down coffee sack with holes for his head and arms that was his usual garb, and lifted his bruised bare feet, one by one, putting them right on the pulpit stump. His trees often grew in land near settlements. That is, he had been a mystic before, and he ended his days in Indiana as a kind of landmark, with the “thick bark of queerness” still on him, thoroughly a mystic again. Altogether, a documented total of twenty-two properties, amounting to twelve hundred acres, can be totted up that he leased or owned for a time. Nova, Ohio, is home to a 176-year-old tree, the last … —From a report of the Society for Printing, Publishing and Circulating the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, Manchester, England, January, 1817. Often the only alcoholic beverage available in frontier settlements was cider. At his death—so the Worths said—he had on a coffee sack, as well as the waist sections of four pairs of old pants cut off and slit so that they lapped “like shingles” around his hips, under an antiquated pair of pantaloons. Instead, he bartered for potatoes, corn meal, salt and flour, and peddled cranberries—a fruit that the pioneers combined into stews or dried with suet for a midwinter treat. Johnny probably lost his patches of orchard land to a more aggressive citizen. He planted large numbers of apple trees in what was the American wilderness two hundred years ago. Preschool. Straight land sales on settled portions of the Ohio River at this time involved terms of two dollars an acre, with fifty cents down. Apples grow up and down both coasts, and they flourish in the Northeast. Chapman died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1845, having planted apple trees as far west as Illinois or Iowa. So, with some of his kin in the area (his brother-in-law worked for him), and with the good will which his exploits in the War of 1812 had engendered and the investments in land that he was attempting to pay for, the region around Perrysville became his home. Government records show that John lived in the Allegheny Mountains in seventeen ninety-seven. He also used this pot for cooking his food. He has actually thawed the ice with his bare feet. Often he shucked corn, split rails, and girdled trees for his keep. No camera captured him — commercial photography was in its infancy when he died in 1845, particularly on the frontier. He believed that the soil produced everything necessary for humans. John Chapman was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in seventeen seventy-four. To his credit, Chapman, who seems to have been friendly with the Quakers of Ohio, too, was able to recognize this. With scant provisions, they took over his abandoned home, and nearly starved. And I'm Steve Ember. If you tried to eat one of John Chapman's apples, it … The son of Nathaniel and Elizabeth (Simons) Chapman, he was born September 26 1774 in Leominster, Worcester County, Massachusetts. He felt comfortable with children, and probably wistful, particularly with girls. He did use snuff, however, and would sip a dram of hard liquor to warm up in cold weather—if one can generalize fairly about his conduct from isolated instances of testimony about five decades of such intense and fervent activity. Trusted Writing on History, Travel, Food and Culture Since 1949, Society for Printing, Publishing and Circulating the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. What did Johnny Appleseed do? He liked to hear the wolves howl around him at night and was unafraid of bears, yet reportedly slept without shelter one snowy night, rather than roust out of hibernation a mother bear and her cubs who had crept into a hollow tree that he had intended using. Johnny Appleseed is a bio-fiction animated feature from Walt Disney, using the nickname of Johnny Appleseed, a real-life American frontiersman born as John Chapman. Lessons and Activities. He believed that it was wrong to kill and eat any creature for food. And I'm Steve Ember with the VOA Special English program PEOPLE IN AMERICA.Today we tell about a man known as Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed, born John Chapman (September 26, 1774 – February 18, 1845), At The turn of the century he shined and sold apples at 47th and Broadway streets in NY City. “I, John Chapman (by occupation a gatherer and planter of apple seeds),” begins a deed from the Fort Wayne days. Read more >>, The magazine was forced to suspend print publication in 2013, but a group of volunteers saved the archives and relaunched it in digital form in 2017. Johnny Appleseed was the name given to John Chapman. John Chapman (September 26, 1774 – March 18, 1845), better known as Johnny Appleseed, was an American pioneer nurseryman who introduced apple trees to large parts of Pennsylvania, Ontario, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, as well as the northern counties of present-day West Virginia. Visit Fort Wayne for the 39th Annual Johnny Appleseed Festival September 21-22, 2013 to learn more and pay homage to this legendary Hoosier. By 1815 he had leased four quarter-sections of land of a hundred and sixty acres each for ninety-nine years at nineteen dollars a year apiece—a Mrs. Jane Cunningham his partner. Johnny Appleseed's real name was John Chapman, and he was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, on September 26, 1774, according to Biography. Not even small boys made fun of him, knowing his boldness at bearing pain— besides walking barefoot in the snow, he would poke needles into himself without flinching, for the children’s edification. Chapman belonged to the Church of New Jerusalem, a religious group based on Swedenborg's teachings. He is said to have cleared land and planted apple seeds near a waterway. Haley wrote a colorful chronicle of Chapman’s life for “Harper’s Weekly,” propelling the legend of Johnny Appleseed into American popular culture. Some of the seeds were planted on land owned by a farmer named Isaac Stedden. I hope she succeeded." He was famous for his gentleness and bravery. Born in September of 1774, John Chapman (i.e. There are indications that at least once he tried, but that in adolescence the girl, like other girls, began to flirt with other men. Yet somehow, despite his eccentric demeanor, he was remarkably effective in the impression he made, “some rare force of gentle goodness dwelling in his looks and breathing in his words,” as W. D. Haley wrote in, In good weather he slept outside; otherwise he would lie down on the floor close to the door of the cabin, as he “did not expect to sleep in a bed in the next world.” But one can picture the suppers of applesauce, apple pie, apple Strudel, apple dumplings, apple turnover, apple cider, apple butter, and apple brown betty he was served by farm wives who had settled in the vicinity of his nurseries. The open air and did not wear shoes on his head, would... 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